Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday June 07, 2013 @05:34PM
from the Tesla,-hallowed-be-your-name dept.

sciencehabit writes "Nothing, some say, turns an atheist into a believer like the fear of death. 'There are no atheists in foxholes,' the saying goes. But a new study suggests that people in stressful situations don't always turn to a higher power. Sometimes, they turn to science. Both athletes preparing for a big race and students asked to write about their own death showed a 15% stronger belief in science than those under less stressful situations (abstract). 'In stressful situations people are likely to turn to whatever worldviews and beliefs are most meaningful to them,' says study co-author, Anna-Kaisa Newheiser, a psychologist at Yale University. And many people find the scientific worldview more compatible with their own."

If you want to phrase it differently not using the word "believe": you need to trust that the scientific community is generally following a reliable method for gaining and improving knowledge.

I don't think it's equivalent to religious faith, but I also don't think it's quite true that no degree of belief is necessary, because it is simply not possible for you, personally, to verify every bit of information you rely on when making use of scientific conclusions. Therefore you need to be able to trust that the

I said once that the best answer to the trap question "Do you believe in evolution?" is "I believe in evolution the same way I believe there is a city called Philadelphia." I've never been to Philadelphia; no, Mr. Ham, I wasn't there. But I've heard about Philadelphia, I've read about Philadelphia, I've seen pictures of Philadelphia, when driving in Baltimore I've seen road signs directing me to Philadelphia, and I've even known people who (claimed to have) lived in Philadelphia--all of which adds up to suf

That's not true either. I could honestly believe there was an intelligent being who created our current universe and simultaneously believe in the process of science. Believing in one does not generally require disbelieving in the other. There are some specific religions that are antithetical to science in their details, but that is a different issue.

Respectfully, I disagree. Religion and science are antithetical in nature. In religion, a thing is believed based on appeal to authority and tradition. In science, a thing is shown to be true (or true as best we can figure) based on demonstrable evidence. There is no room in science for accepting propositions based on appeals to authority or tradition. Nor is there any room in religion for the idea that basic assumptions can be tossed aside just because they conflict with evidence.

Science and religion are not intrinsically opposed to one another, but answer different questions with very little overlap from one to the other.

I contend that science and religion have 100% overlap in their intended usage. Both science and religion are used to give us the answer to "why?". Nothing more; nothing less.

When you talk about finding purpose and meaning you are really talking about the human tendency to anthropomorphize just about everything. There is meaning and purpose behind our actions, or at least we have that perception (depending on whether free will exists). That is what incorrectly causes us to project meaning and purpose into all aspects of life. It is a very useful trait, and our very ability to do this is part what separates us from other animals. But it is also a big flaw in our brain's ability to reason properly, along with plenty of other natural biases that adversely affect our ability to make good decisions. Honestly it is a miracle that we are able to think the way we do at all, so it is reasonable that our capacity for thought has many problems.

Science does currently have an answer to the question of purpose and meaning. It is that our primitive brains made those concepts up. Luckily a well trained mind is sometimes able to identify biases such as these and rule them out during decision making.

The problem is, even if you can prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that we made up the idea of a creator, all that means is that you disproved the notion of a creator *as developed by humans*. The fact that humans invented a creator, does not mean there is no creator.

A well trained mind would understand the limitations of science. Science works with falsifiable theories. The existence of a creator is not falsifiable. Hence, even the best trained scientific mind would merely state that the notion of a creator is merely not useful as a predictor of natural events. And indeed, while any potential deities refuse to come forward and prove to a huge audience their power, this is true.

The nice thing is... you don't need to disbelieve to be a good scientist, you just have to accept that the supernatural is not useful in a discussion of natural processes. If God can create miracles, those miracles are, effectively, outside of science and thus useless to study as science. The antagonism between science and religion is the result of people on both sides with the lack of imagination to understand that there is essentially no real argument, and that maybe they should both just relax. If there is a creator, then he/she/it created those processes and so those processes are the actual proof of creation, albeit a proof we will never be able to understand as part of creation. If there is no creator, then everything looks the same, there is just another reason for it. Neither really helps us discover a theory of quantum gravity.

The problem is, even if you can prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that we made up the idea of a creator, all that means is that you disproved the notion of a creator *as developed by humans*. The fact that humans invented a creator, does not mean there is no creator.

No, but it blows away any rationale for believing in a creator, because to believe in a different sort of creator, you must make one up.

Good answer, but I would contend that Science asks "How?" while Religion asks "Why?". Science is not concerned with the philosophical reasoning for things, it just seeks to understand the process.

Science is most certainly concerned with the philosophical reasoning for things. Science itself sprung up from the field of philosophy. But it is not concerned with inventing existential reasons for the actions of inanimate objects which have no intent. Science is very concerned with why humans feel the need to anthropomorphize things such as the beginning of the universe, the rising sun, or any number of natural phenomenons. Just because science doesn't invent answers when the real answers (to the best of

That's true mostly because religion retreats from those areas where science arrives. Because it cannot compete, seeing as science actually *works*.

Religion used to have opinions on lightning. (Thor, the god of thunder being angry blabla) But that's no longer sustainable now that science has a better explanation, one that makes sense and fits the observations. Science can quantify ligthning, they can predict it, they can shield you from it, they can even harness it.

The same is true for disease. Draught. Variations in the mechanical properties of iron. (it's brittle because of high carbon-content, not because you failed to sacrifice a hen while melting it...)

Today, religion is mostly stuck at "why", since there's very few areas left where religions answer to "how" aren't laughable.

In science, there is no believing. Science is not about belief and faith. Science is not a religion. Science is facts, evidence, and logical deductions. The Big Bang is a theory that fits the facts we have. Is it right or wrong? Likely it is more subtle than that, and is correct as far as it goes, but is not anywhere close to a complete explanation. It certainly has difficult problems. There is no faith involved in that.

As to the idea that our observations may not be reliable, that what we see, hear, and measure may not reflect reality, and pretending otherwise is just acting on faith, this is an old problem in philosophy. How do we know anything we sense is real? We don't know. Is it faith to act as if what we sense is real? No! We accept that what we sense is reality, not out of faith, but because it doesn't make sense to follow any other line of reasoning. Imperfect though our understanding of reality is, and perhaps must be, we can still work with it, and we have. We would never have been able to make integrated circuits, radios, and all the other marvels of modern techonolgy if we didn't have some understanding of apparent reality.

What if we go with a hypothesis that we aren't sensing reality, that there is a deeper reality that we can't sense? Assuming it exists, what could the nature of this deeper reality be? If it is a supernatural reality, then that ends the scientific inquiry right there. Science is only about the natural, not the supernatural. Soon as the supernatural is invoked, it's all chaos. Anything at all might be true of a supernatural reality.

If you claim there is a deeper reality and it is natural, but that it cannot be observed, that makes things difficult, but hardly insurmountable. How can we know it even exists, if there is no way to observe it? Without any way to sense it, perform experiments on it, or extrapolate its effects to things we can observe, we can only speculate wildly. First, anyone making such a claim ought to have some sort of rationale for it. We do speculate, with ideas like that our universe is only a part of a multiverse, or that our reality is actually not 4 dimensions, but 10 or 26, with the extra dimensions being so small that we can't perceive them. This is not reaching for faith, this is simply speculation. Even if we can't sort this out now, we may be able to in the future.

The problem with using words like belief and faith is that they have ugly connotations. A belief is simply a state in which someone holds a premise to be true. Faith is simply having confidence in something. But unfortunately when most people talk about faith, they mean a belief that is not based on proof. They mean having a level of conviction high enough that no matter what evidence presents itself, they will still hold onto their beliefs. This is primarily why most scientifically minded people reject using the word Faith, even though they still have faith in many things based on most definitions of the word.

That depends on how you define "religion". True Religion is living the lifestyle necessary to prove your beliefs.

I am not sure where you got that definition. Every definition of religion I have ever seen relates a system of beliefs with a supernatural and spiritual component. You really need to bastardize the definition of religion to claim that science is a religion. If you are willing to rewrite the definitions of common words then you can probably "win" just about any argument you want to.

As soon as Science _dictates_ how a person can understand truth it has become a religion.

No, it becomes a religion when your beliefs have supernatural explanations. That is it.

I agree that there are ways to discover truth without the use of the scientific method. Early humans learned that plants need water to grow long before we formalized the use of hypothesis, experiments, and theories (although you could contend that we were informally doing that). Science does not claim that the scientific method is the only way to find truth, although it does claim it is the best method we have found so far.

Technically Science is NOT a system of acquiring truth but about removing ignorance. (A quite successful masculine path as everyone is aware of.

Um, ignorance means a lack of accurate knowledge. Truth means having accurate knowledge. So saying something is about remove ignorance is the exact same thing as saying something is about gaining truth.

The other system IS a way of acquiring truth. Since it is the feminine path it is no wonder most men chose to remain ignorant and blindly ignore it.

No, religion is about holding onto beliefs so you can be confident that you have found the truth. Just believing in something does not get you closer to the truth, it just increased your confidence. Accurate knowledge (truth) is a system of justified true propositions. Religion is about holding onto beliefs based on faith, not going out and discovering justifications for those beliefs.

That is why _mind_ NOT space is the final frontier. Space is finite. The Mind is infinite.

This is just silly. I honestly didn't even read this last sentence until after I started responding, and now realize that I probably shouldn't have even bothered.

One clarification: particular scientific theories (e.g. particular cosmological origin models) are falsifiable. However, "science" as the overall framework/method is not falsifiable in the same sense. What type of experimental evidence would convince you that "science doesn't work," rather than "this particular scientific theory doesn't work, and needs to be exchanged for another"? Science has a great track record of producing theories that are easily falsifiable but end up not being easily falsified; but "

To believe in science (and to disbelieve in religion), one needs to believe that the elements needed to create the big bang came into existence of their own accord and that the laws of physics decided to invent themselves.

Science is great up to a point; it can tell us what happened and how it happened. But when you go back far enough, it does requires the belief that everything which set off the chain of events somehow came into being without an intelligent creator.

Why should I have any more trouble believing in an uncaused universe than in an uncaused divinity?

Actually, the atheist assumes less, because s/he merely assumes the universe. The theist has to assume a god that can speak the universe into being. (Plus heaven, hell, souls, etc.)

Science isn't something you believe in, it's something you use. If I use a hammer to nail a picture up on the wall, does this mean I believe in hammer or does it just mean I used a hammer to achieve some desired result?

A scientific result is something you may choose to believe or not believe, depending on the level of confidence you have in the team behind it and the rigour of their methods. To believe in a scientific result on the other hand sounds to me more of a fanatical position than a rational one.

If I use a hammer to nail a picture up on the wall, does this mean I believe in hammer

Yes, you believed the hammer would be suitable for fulfilling particular claims associated with hammers --- that it would quickly and easily drive the nail into the wall. There are probably reasons you chose to use a hammer to do this, rather than a rotten tomato or your eyeball. Likewise, people believe particular religions are suitable tools for producing claimed results --- from bringing rains to parched crops, to assuring eternal transcendent life. Often, this doesn't work out as reliably as the hammer

To believe in science (and to disbelieve in religion), one needs to believe that the elements needed to create the big bang came into existence of their own accord and that the laws of physics decided to invent themselves.

Actually, to "believe" in science, the only thing that's strictly required is that you believe that the universe is knowable. Even the ways you use to know more stuff (the "scientific method") are not "a priori", that is, if you can think of a better way to discover stuff about the universe, then it will become part of the scientific method.

Science doesn't a priori reject the possibility of a creator (God), just as it doesn't a priori require that the universe came into existence of its own accord. The Big

To believe in science (and to disbelieve in religion), one needs to believe that the elements needed to create the big bang came into existence of their own accord and that the laws of physics decided to invent themselves.

Science is great up to a point; it can tell us what happened and how it happened. But when you go back far enough, it does requires the belief that everything which set off the chain of events somehow came into being without an intelligent creator.

I don't believe in scientific results. I believe in science as a process (in the same way that I can say I believe in Democracy as a process [for better or for worse!])

I would hope many scientists would hold a similar view, but I cannot speak for them.

In terms of cosmology - science attempts to unravel the chain of causality that resulted in the world we see today. To do this, it is assumed the universe works today much like it always has (and tries to determine the edge conditions that define that). It is also assumed that there is a point beyond which causality can no longer be followed (or that it loops back on itself or whatever. That there is a beginning, anyway - that' it's not just "turtles all the way down"). Now admittedly they're big assumptions but they seem to hold up so far, and without those assumtions the questions become meaningless in the first place.

So what happens then is that you work backwards, until a point is found for which there are multiple possible explanations. Then evidence is gathered based on experimentation and observation about which of the options seems most likely. As part of this process new options might get introduced.

What you end up with is the most likely set of explanations for the way the universe came to be the way it is, based on what we know today and what we can observe today.

It's not a presented as fact, but rather what is termed a "theory" for science, based on probability. Note that in this case the word "Theory" avoids presenting something as absolute fact whilst providing the implication of a comprehensive and somewhat tested framework, and still leaving the door open for testing and even disproving. It doesn't mean "Guess".

As for "believing" that " the elements needed to create the big bang came into existence of their own accord and that the laws of physics decided to invent themselves." - this isn't a belief per se, but part of the assumption that the chain of causality ends somewhere. If something "caused" the big bang (er - other than the big bang itself), then by definition the big bang wasn't the start of the universe, but we have to go back further. So if you assume it started somewhere then you have to assume that "before" that was unknowable, as it cannot be traced back.

In this regard - if there was a "creator" - it is/was either one that can interact with/affect the observable universe or not. If it is, then we can push the start of the universe back to be the "start" of the creator. But if not then the issue is meaningless from a scientific standpoint.

But when you go back far enough, it does requires the belief that everything which set off the chain of events somehow came into being without an intelligent creator.

No, it doesn't. "I don't know" is a perfectly valid answer, without having to attribute it to a god, faeries, gnomes or the flying spaghetti monster.

"I don't know, so there must be a god" is without any fundament, and leads to what is known as "god of the gaps".

(Also, whoever modded parent "flamebait", you are being unfair. He is stating his views in a very polite way, and obviously ready to discuss the subject. Praise him for it, since it is so rare among religious people.)

Absolutely untrue. Artificially: I point at LSD. Involuntarily: I point at dreams. Voluntarily: I point at imagination. "Experience" is a mental state. It's not in any way an assurance that you're perceiving reality. That requires quite a bit more, starting with the basics: consensuality, repeatability, and so forth. Things notably lacking in the realm of superstition.

Some of us have experienced God, yet you're absolutely sure that all those people are insane.

Doctors are human and there are still big holes in our knowledge of disease and of human biology, so yeah it's entirely possible that a given doctor's advice may not be the best way to actually go for a given persons' case/illness. Doctors give advice based on the best knowledge available at the time (to them. No one person can know all of modern medicine and still have time to consult!).
Changing techniques based on empirical evidence is very scientific.
I'd imagine that doctor was/is very interested in th

And he was considered the world's foremost expert on her condition. She lived longer than all his other patients, double over the next highest person. And he changed his treatment methods after her success even though it didn't make logical sense, because it had the best results. (Incidentally, that's HOW he became the world's foremost expert on her condition.)

So, which is it - was the the world's foremost expert before or after? Methinks some shit you said may be made up.

And my mom chose to believe what she felt God was telling her instead of what the doctor was telling her.

Thousands of other people die doing exactly the same. Were they not good enough to be saved? Sometimes people get lucky, and for some reason some people just can't accept this and have to invent some driving force behind the supposed miracle to literally sing their praises to, and mumble at in a cold building once a week.

In numerous cases, her intuition was right and he was wrong.

Sorry, but when it comes to medical treatments, your mom does not count as "numerous cases." She is one case of many, and quite likely an outlier. How many other people have disregarded their doctor's advice, used their own intuition, and subsequently died horrible painful deaths? You wouldn't be here telling us the story if that had happened (as it sadly has to so many people).

Statistically speaking, you're an idiot if you play the lottery. Any mathematician will tell you not to do it. Yet somewhere out there, at least one person usually wins, and for that one person, it's a wonderful bit of luck that wouldn't have happened if they'd listen to the statisticians. But it's random chance.

Here's another one. If a thousand people around the world toss a coin ten times, statistically speaking it's likely that one of them will get ten heads. If that person came here and wrote a post like yours, proclaiming it a miracle and praise be to the FSM, can you see why we'd be right to dismiss it? If so, why shouldn't we dismiss your anecdote as evidence of nothing but random chance?

And he changed his treatment methods after her success even though it didn't make logical sense, because it had the best results.

If that's really true, I don't want him having anything to do with the treatment of me or my family members.

(Incidentally, that's HOW he became the world's foremost expert on her condition.)

Incidentally, that's why we have bullshit like homeopathy. It "worked" once or twice, by coincidence, and people seized on it with both hands and won't be disabused of the ridiculous notion despite all the subsequent scientifically gained evidence that it's rubbish.

She lived longer than all his other patients, double over the next highest person.

Ummm. The fact that she lived longer than other patients just means that she lived longer than other patients. I am sure that some patients lived a lot less than other patients. It had nothing to do with god. It had to do with the fact that people react to diseases and treatments differently. Some people live longer than some people who live longer than some people.

She lived longer than all his other patients, double over the next highest person.

Ummm. The fact that she lived longer than other patients just means that she lived longer than other patients. I am sure that some patients lived a lot less than other patients. It had nothing to do with god. It had to do with the fact that people react to diseases and treatments differently. Some people live longer than some people who live longer than some people.

IMO the common conceit that "God healed/rescued me/Granny", while letting all the others suffer and die, is the very pinnacle of arrogance.

One could argue however that thanks to nuclear weapons research (including this example) - we've not had a major worldwide conflict in nearly 70 years, after having two in 30 years. We also understand a lot more about fundamental physics thanks to the side benefits of weapons research and that helps medicine, the energy industry, and may help the space industry down the track...

Bad stuff happens. We move on and in some way usually learn from it. That's life

The core of science is the scientific method, which is a set of mental tools and processes designed to help us figure out the truth and avoid our inherent biases and cognitive limitations. The part that's important to your question is this: extraordinary claims must require extraordinary evidence to be considered valid.

Not even considering the content and supposed provenance of the Christian Bible, just the claim that there is an entity with the qualities and attributes ascribed to the Christian God is an e

I do this when I fly. I hate turbulence. As a professional scientist, when the plane starts bouncing, I think of 777 stress tests--how wings are flexed 30 feet at the end before they break, and how turbulence is jiggling us up and down on the 10ft level, when we're going forward hundreds of feet every second. There's a 747 cross-section/cutout in the British Transportation Museum that shows no metal stress after 30 years of service. Thinking of hard core science and its successes almost always calms me down.

It's the psychological effect of feeling helpless. As a passenger, you have absolutely no control over what happens and can't even see what's in front of you. You're just at the mercy of the plane, mechanics and pilot. For the most part, participants in adrenaline sports are completely in control of what happens.

I was on a flight last year and during take-off with a gusty crosswind our plane skidded to the side probably 20 feet. All of the passengers were bouncing around, and people were grabbing on to

I'd be interested to see(though am at a loss for how one could...ethically...arrange such a test) whether you see the same thing in mortality-salience scenarios where it is explicitly clear that science won't help here, or whether that leads to a sharp jump in enthusiasm for something else.

Given the sheer scale of applied science's obvious successes(and, where applicable, the equally dramatic and unmistakable nature of its fuckups) it isn't a huge surprise that people would find some degree of belief in it almost inevitable. To do otherwise would be like trying to make it through a dinner party with the Hellenic pantheon without recourse to polytheism.

However, there are plenty of things that(while fundamentally amenable to scientific investigation) the answers available so far are incomplete and/or very bad news. I'm inclined to wonder if, in the face of this sort of 'failure' by science, people would skew in some other direction. Anecdotally, the steady trickle of terminal cancer cases and other incurables to the wacky and sometimes gruesome world of alt-med suggests yes; but anecdotes are more emotionally compelling than actually informative.

I'd be interested to see(though am at a loss for how one could...ethically...arrange such a test) whether you see the same thing in mortality-salience scenarios where it is explicitly clear that science won't help here

Maybe the underlying point is that people, on average, rush to believe in something that they don't understand when they are under stress. For people who have rejected religious belief but do not understand science, it is natural that they would rush to "believe" in science. This is a well-understood phenomenon [wikipedia.org].

Not doubting everything; there are a few assumptions held --- though they may seem so "obvious" that you don't even realize making them. For example, the assumption that the universe is somewhat "repeatable" and amenable to mathematical and logical description: if an experiment about one thing in one circumstance can't tell you anything about other things in other circumstances, then science is entirely useless.

For example, the assumption that the universe is somewhat "repeatable" and amenable to mathematical and logical description: if an experiment about one thing in one circumstance can't tell you anything about other things in other circumstances, then science is entirely useless.

G[eneral]R[elativity] predicts that gravitational waves travel at the speed of light. Many alternatives to GR say that gravitational waves travel faster than light. If true, this could result in failure of causality.

Note that I didn't specifically say "causality," only "repeatability." Causality is a particular method for embedding repeatability and logical order in the universe, that so far seems to hold up awfully well. Scientifically contemplating the potential for non-causal structures doesn't mean discarding the notion that, whatever these post-GR theories are, they still produce testable/repeatable behavior in the universe.

WTF? The base of science is doubting everything - if you can't falsify a hypothesis, that hypothesis is outside the area of science.

Is this some insidious way to push towards the position that science and religion are both a matter of belief?

'Science' as a method and body of accrued knowledge isn't a matter of belief(which is why it has a long history of getting shit done while lesser epistemology waves its hands at uncertainty or contentedly chews its own cud); but an individual's relation to that body of knowledge is, necessarily, largely a belief test:

Even a practicing scientist will have personally tested only a tiny area of the world, and read in any detail only a slightly larger one(at which point they are already trusting their colleague

'Science' as a method and body of accrued knowledge isn't a matter of belief(which is why it has a long history of getting shit done while lesser epistemology waves its hands at uncertainty or contentedly chews its own cud);

The scientific method and accrued body of evidence do rely on some belief that the universe is reasonably repeatable/predictable; that it's worth some effort to, e.g., measure the orbits of planets and come up with mathematical laws describing them, because the planets won't suddenly switch from elliptical to square orbits, then turn into dancing giraffes, just to spite you. This belief continues to be born out by an ever-widening body of evidence, but technically it's still just a belief (with an impressiv

Unless you are willing to re-do all the important scientific experiments ever done yourself, then you have to trust that other people did them correctly and reported them correctly, and also if their reasoning is beyond you, that their reasoning was valid. So from a personal perspective, it requires trust and belief in the work of others. Actually, it is this same trust and belief which means that average scientists generally won't discover new things in unexpected places (unless by accident), because scien

Unless you are willing to re-do all the important scientific experiments ever done yourself, then you have to trust that other people did them correctly and reported them correctly, and also if their reasoning is beyond you, that their reasoning was valid. So from a personal perspective, it requires trust and belief in the work of others.

It requires trust, it does not require belief - there are two different things.

E.g. - you won't believe in your government, but you may trust it if the rules of the game are lowering the probability for it to cheat, without repeating the whole exercise of government yourself

People can believe in anything, whether it's true or not. I believe if i drop something it will fall. I believe if i go to the local store i will be able to trade money for goods. I believe that the scientific method when followed with rigor produces reasonably accurate and occasionally very useful results.

Some people may believe in science on more of a "faith" basis, not understanding the process but accepting it based on results. Some people believe in religion because of faith. Some people believe in r

If I insisted that there were three invisible planets orbiting the sun between Jupiter and Saturn, most people would think I was a crackpot.

If I insisted that there was an invisible being that spoke the whole universe into being, plus a lot of other invisible stuff like Heaven and souls, most people would think I knew what I was talking about.

People would ask how you could tell, but no-one else could, that the planets were there. The "Invisible Guy" hypothesis is supported by testimony from a large number of people, who consider themselves to have personally seen/felt/experienced/trusted Invisible Guy's actions. You may not believe a single word of that testimony --- and consider it a massive collective delusion --- but that does offer an explanation of why one stance (supported by testimony from a single person) is considered "crackpot," while

I usually phrase it more diplomatically, but often people assume atheism is some sort of conscious cop-out to avoid all the hard morality that supposedly stems from religion. If the opening for discussion presents itself, I always soft-sell atheism on a negative note. Atheism offers shit for consolation on the issue of death. Friends, loved ones, family, parents, children, all of them are just gonna die and turn to dirt. That is a real shit sandwich atheism gives you right there, and there's a lot more where that came from. In this way I can steer the conversation in the direction of "People aren't atheists because they prefer not having to deal with religion, but just because they think it's the truth."

Frankly if I thought the idea of a sky-fairy running a magical kingdom keeping us all immortal forever was even remotely plausible, I'd convert yesterday. But, frankly, it ISN'T even remotely plausible, which is why I'm an atheist. Clearly some of the people in this article made the jump. Good for them. They get some consolation in their time of grief. Being right is overrated.

I always thought that was a stupid analogy anyway. There are also no unsoiled underpants in foxholes. But very few people think that means we should all go around shitting our pants on a regular basis.

Living by what your brain spews out under severe overstress doesn't make much sense. It's like using results from your computer that it calculated while you were zapping the motherboard with a Tesla coil.

You know, I always wondered when I watched one of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies why they had Davy Jones (the wet one, not the Monkey) ask, "Do you fear death?". I mean, why the heck would I fear death? That just isn't something I would worry about. Now, I greatly fear suffering, paralysis, and things like that. Enough that I don't want to engage in dangerous things like base jumping. Not because I fear ceasing to exist. Because I fear I would still exist, but be paralyzed or in great pain for the re

The abstract and the commentary imply the canard that faith in science and faith in religion must be at odds. This isn't the case in theory or practice. There is no philosophical incompatibility in believing that science and God both work, or even that God works through science. And in practice, most religious believers exhibit plenty of faith that science works and are comfortable with it.

Absolutely. Actually, I believe that science works through God in that it is God who established and maintains the physical laws that we see. After all, where did they come from, and what keeps them running? So my faith in science is rooted in my faith in God and His faithfulness to keep the natural world around me running just like He did yesterday and the day before, etc. Science is therefore the study of God's faithfulness. He is so reliable that we can create formulas based upon it.

The formulas do not demonstrate the presense of any deities. They show the relationship between cause and effect; not a sign of a divine intelligence, love, hate, desire to be worshipped or any other attributes generally associated with deities. Basing a belief in a deity upon the laws of the universe as we understand them is non-sensical. So you need some other basis for bringing a deity into the picture.

It depends. Theism in general is not incompatible, but plenty of particulars from this religion or the other are not compatible with scientific knowledge and/or logic. So they are not complete opposites, but they are not orthogonal either. Hence much of the confusion.

So there is this process we use to help make predictions. Its called "science". It helps us form predictions that correlate with reality. Some people "believe" in it, I just use it. When I need to hammer in a nail, I use a tool: a hammer. When I need to make a prediction which I would like to correlate with reality, I use a tool: science.

Science is a tool: it helps you do specific kinds of things. It is useful.

This reminds me of my "creationism is useless" argument. Evolution helps you make predictions which correlate with reality. Its part of the science tool, and its very useful. Creationism does not help you make predictions that correlate with reality. Thus, its not useful in the scientific respect. Even if its true, its not science, so it should be taught in the department that covers that kind of thing (history) it you teach it at all. On the other side, evolution, even if incorrect, is useful science, and thus belongs in science classes.

We didn't stop teaching Newtonian mechanics because relative proved it wrong. They still make useful predictions that correlate with reality. Its still science, and we should still teach it, even-though we know its wrong.

Why does no one make that point? Maybe because they don't know what science is? (It would really suck to not to have science in my toolbox!)

Seriously. I believe I have heard every single argument from either side about a thousand times, and that was just this morning. Agree to disagree already. Maybe find another hobby that isn't a complete waste of time. If I did happen to have an interest in someone's belief one way or the other, I would ask about it.

When my wife was fighting cancer, it got to the point that we were told by her doctors that she would die of it. Not an unreasonable conclusion, as she had a very aggressive cancer, and we had tried all of the standard treatments.

Faced with that situation, we found that we placed more faith both in science and religion, simultaneously. We went all over the country to see the best experts in her particular cancer, and we also accepted prayers from all religions, all denominations. Obviously we focused the lion's share of our energies on her treatment (science), but we did not neglect the spiritual.

A funny thing happened. We traveled to see a one expert, a delightful old fellow who happened to be of our same religion. He took a particular interest in her case, and wound up unearthing a many-decades-old study that showed success in treating women in a similar position to my wife. Ultimately, it did wind up working for my wife, and she survived.

So, in summary, we threw our faith at anything we could find, science and religion. Was there some intervention that placed the idea in this doctor's head to search such old studies? Well, how the hell should I know? All I know is that she alive in the next room instead of dead in a cemetery, so I'm happy. I wouldn't change a thing.

When the going gets difficult, it is not a time for nonsense. That is not surprising at all.

From "Plato and platypus walk into a bar" - One day a man fell into a well. While falling he managed to grasp a root and hanged precariously over the abyss. "Is there anybody out there" - shouts the man desperately. No reply for a while and suddenly a big voice booms from above "It is me, the Lord. Let go of the root and I will save you". The man thinks a little and shouts "Is there anyone else out there?".

From "Miracle in the Andes" (the famous true story, also shown in the movie "Alive") - in the beginning of the ordeal, the captain of the team (one of the most devoted believers, although all of them were in principle believers, or they were supposed to be) shows real leadership and courage. However, he firmly believes that God will save them and does with such conviction that once they hear on the radio that the search for them is cancelled suddenly the man collapsed completely. 3 people from the team are described as being shaky in their believes. One dies (fascinating conversations with this man can be found in the book) and the other two (one is the author of the book, Nando Parado) save them all. The two least believers did not loose the desire to try something and at the end they found a way to save them all. Read the whole thing - I am not good enough to describe it to you.

Third example - there is a countryman of mine, who is almost 40 years in the space and aviation industry of USA. He has a collection of 200+ stories on social , economic and military themes he experienced (just a few) or collected (the rest) from other people. Alas, all is in my native tongue which is perhaps understood by ca. 100/. readers at best. Anyhow, he has a fascinating story about a Vietnam veteran who was serving on a medical helicopter. When he was recruited for this specific job towards the end of the training, the major who was looking for people to do this job told him that he always looked for cynical, realistic people, preferably non-believers. Everyone else cracks on the job. Because it is such a horrific a job and more dangerous than being active soldier people who held any kind of delusions would not survive it. Reading the rest of the story shows that the recruiting major has nailed it in the center...

I have seen people like you parrot select quotes from the bible and taking them completely out of context.

I don't select them to take them completely out of context - I select them because they are hilariously funny! Research in psychology shows that humor is important for a person's well-being, so I guess that cracking oneself up is one of the ways in which the Bible can vastly improve a person's life.

If you read them within the context, they make more sense even to someone like you

That is extremely unlikely. For example, it eludes me how "context" could give any more sense to the claim that a transcendental being that supposedly created a universe with five hundred billion galaxies, each w

I love the circular reasoning in "The bible is the proven word of God. You really don't need any more proof than that." - so it's proven by the fact that it is proven. Hm. Rightio then.

Then there's a no-true-scotsman fallacy of if you've read it and don't believe it, then you've not really read it. Hm. Rightio then.

I'd love to understand why Bible believers think that, for non-believers, the Bible in particular is special?
Seriously - for someone who already doesn't believe in god(s), what would make them believe the Bible over the Torah, the Qur'an, the I Ching, the Guru Granth Sahib, the Principia Discordia or "There and Back Again" as a text of divine inspiration?

Finally - I have read the Bible several times. Fascinating read really (till you get to all the post-gospel stuff near the end to the new testament - I really don't care about early christians' "How are you doing over there then?" letters for example...)
But enlightenment did not come. Instead, the more I read the Bible the more I find it's just a curious collection of old folk tales and legends (old testament) combined with a dogma assembled by committee (new testament).
And Christians rarely live their lives strictly according to scripture btw. The average christian violates an awful lot of it whilst handwaving huge chunks as being "irrelevant" in the modern church (!). Which is fine if you accept that you're not living strictly according to the book. But don't pretend you are.

Finally - frankly, if it were written today the Bible would have a very rough time with censors. It's seriously lurid in parts. Incest, rape, slavery (both labour-based and sexual), extremely graphic violence, inciting racial hatreds... Much of which is presented as a good thing! It would probably be banned these days. I certainly will consider carefully when my son will be ready to understand the adult themes in the Bible for sure. I don't want to give him nightmares.

My dad had a customer who had been a paratrooper in Normandy. My brother made some dumb remark about 'no atheists in foxholes', and Dick snapped back at him, "More atheists are made in foxholes than anywhere else, because no god worth worshiping would allow something like that to go on!"

Exactly my reaction after staying in hospitals too often as a kid -- religious adults would tell me that I'd survived/recovered because their god was there lovingly protecting me, but by adulthood I could only think that I didn't want to believe in (let alone worship) a deity that allows or causes the kind of horrible things I witnessed/experienced.

I like to say that the greatest trick the devil ever played wouldn't be convincing the world they didn't exist, but rather convincing the world they were god. I mean god is a nasty motherf&cker with an appitite for destruction and death.

Who keeps spreading this garbage about God supposed to make life all soft and safe for the innocent and believers?I never did get that argument. Usually trotted out by atheist converts to counter "feel good" dogma propagated by corporate churches and popular sects.Now me, I like an atheist who has read the Bible, Apocrypha and early Christian writings, has some history, archaeology, etymology or other supporting science under their belt and has done some rigor for their lack of faith. They would never make

Hmm, last I checked no one had confirmed the existence of free will. I tend to favour the theory of Howard Bloom that free will is only likely if electrons and photons have it, and the world of science is only just starting to delve into the new theory of quantum communication afaik.

It has long been established in logic that there are things which are true which cannot be proven. Free will may be an example of one of those things.

Nonetheless, until science can show conclusively otherwise, we may as well presume that free will exists, since based on what we *do* know, we appear to behave as though we have it, even though we can't specifically explain it.

Several times God commanded it, endorsed rulers who practiced violence , wiped out worshipers of other "Gods" and let's not forget the Plagues that predated chemical warfare by many centuries.Atheists aren't made in foxholes, they're made in church pews. The fault lies in the milktoast politically correct,historically incorrect, censored, edited, watered down, council of Trent approved garbage preached by modern organized religion. It doesn't make sense, often misinterpreted for the sake reflecting "feel go

If God were to just turn around and stop us every time we make a wrong choice, then what on earth would the point be of giving us a free will?From your logic can we conclude you are opposed to all laws, as well ?

Don't blame God for shit that is caused just because people don't know how to maturely get along with other people.

Have you read the Bible? Because if you believe what's written there, people were getting along just fine, learning technology and how to make bricks instead of using stones. Building a city and within that city a tower taller than any ever built before, as a monument to what they could accomplish together. "And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth." (Genesis 11:5-9)

So yeah, His response to people maturely getting along with other people was to scatter them all over the Earth, and making them speak different languages to make cooperation more difficult.

For God to disallow it would be to interfere with the the freely made choices that created that situation, invalidating the very purpose of giving us free will in the first place. If God were to just turn around and stop us every time we make a wrong choice, then what on earth would the point be of giving us a free will?

Unless we're freely making making the right choices, right? Then He gets to interfere, and it somehow doesn't invalidate free will.

Look pal, I don't have a problem with people who believe in God, or have any religion whatsoever. As long as religion isn't brought into science classrooms, or used to make government policy, I'm fine with it. I do, however, hate this tendency of religious people to praise God for everything that turns out well, without giving credit to the work humans put into it (You walked way from that horrible car accident: clearly God saved you. The engineers designing the crumple zone and mercilessly doing crash tests obviously had nothing to do with it), while simultaneously blaming humans and leaving God blameless for everything that's bad (God didn't put you in foxholes, people's decisions did it). You can't do that. Either you believe He interferes with the world, in which case He has to take part of the blame for our suffering, or you believe He doesn't interfere with the world, in which case He doesn't get part of the credit for our successes.

Right, except we have a model of what people do when there is a universal monoculture, and a nice example just last century within the USSR. The "top" ends up slaughtering the middle, like the 50 million dead of its own citizens in that case.

Oh no, you don't. That passage includes God's justification, and it doesn't even imply anything near what you're saying here. Read it again: "And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do." He's saying if they were allowed to continue, no accomplishment would be beyond their grasp, and this is why they had to be stopped.

God doesn't give a fuck "personally" if people build a big tower, he's hardly going to be intimidated.

Foxholes aside, as a poster above observes, birth defects, infections, cancers, natural disasters, etc., quite often aren't the result of "our choices", and yet clearly this imaginary omniscient, omnipresent, benevolent deity is perfectly happy to let them go on regardless, though ameliorating them would not interfere in the least with our "free will."

It's so obvious that the characterization typical of the major religions cannot be the c

Fortunately, popular opinion does not decide what the truth is. What am I in the minority of in human history, anyway? If we're looking at all humans who have ever lived, no religion can claim to be a majority. Even within large, organized religions that rally together under a single label, there is considerable disagreement over what happens to a person after death. There has never been a majority consensus on the subject.

Also, you may change your mind when you are actually faced with death. Many people who believe like you very much think about it when death actually is imminent.